An Interactive Arts Installation
Our Common Threads is an art installation that will deliver a multi-sensory experience – visual, kinetic, tactile – that will be a site for empathy-building and connecting with humans and the biotic and abiotic environment. This engaged art piece features a fishing net that killed an orca in 2019 off the coast of Twillingate, NL, marking the first recorded orca death in Newfoundland waters. Conference attendees and visitors and community members to Shore2Shore will actively transform a piece of this fishing net into a crocheted tapestry. It will be accompanied by a piece of the fishing net that was previously turned into a crocheted tapestry through community-engaged artmaking in Conche, NL on the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in 2025. This project – From Tragedy to Tapestry – was a collaborative process with the French Shore Interpretation Centre in Conche led by the community transforming an object of unsustainability into a cultural artifact. The process was mobilized through culture and traditional relations that still exist with textile crafts, creating a beautiful mosaic of individual contributions of sustainability inspired by inner values, perspectives, and interpretations of how sustainability can be addressed at a local scale.
The entirety of Our Common Threads will capture new stories, knowledge, and perspectives through this interactive crochet art installation, remaking a new piece of the fishing net into a collaborative crocheted tapestry exploring diverse interpretations of what creates coastal community sustainability. It will begin on the French Shore for Iceberg Festival June 5-14, 2026.
At Grenfell Campus, a space will be encompassed by the net and become a focal point for knowledge sharing and co-creation. People can walk around and through the net to experience its ominous liminal space juxtaposed by the tapestry from Conche where feelings of empathy and hope will arise from the combination of its journey from ecological destruction to cultural artifact, sparking different perspectives and interpretations that can be added to enrich the meaning of the tapestry.
Academics, practitioners, and community members will be invited to share stories and knowledge which will be captured in the net and threaded into a new tapestry made of diverse perspectives, crocheted together into a tapestry connecting disparate ways of knowing. Crocheted contributions would be inspired by the multisensory fishing net installation or the conference subthemes of relational wellness. There will be a crochet workshop and demonstrations for people to contribute artistic creations that represent inner knowledge and personal experience. People can also participate by suggesting designs, patterns, and images which will also be crocheted live throughout the week. We will actively sew and crochet during the 8-day experience from the conference to Shore2Shore. There will be a registry of all artwork where participants can write a story or explanation. Each stitch will hold embodied scientific, local, and Indigenous knowledge, with the overall piece woven into a story of transformation and ecological sustainability built through relational knowledge.
We will reclaim this object of death and breathe new life into its purpose. It will serve as a collective voice of community members and conference attendees, a physical representation of relationality through perspectives of researchers, artists, knowledge holders, and community members. This collective work will inform future participant-engaged art projects aiming to continue to repurpose the fishing net and having people learn from the net tapestry from Conche. Our Common Threads will continue the lifecycle of knowledge generation and sustainability transformation.
Relational wellness focuses on the health and strength of relationships and connections between various individuals and communities. It requires an amount of trust to mutually support one another. This installation and interactive activity is an exercise in empathy-building and trust. To share personal experiences requires participants to feel safe to express themselves. This atmosphere of safety and authenticity will be fostered as participants become comfortable interacting with one another in a space that encourages creativity, feeling emotions, and breaking away from the rigidity of professional roles, titles, and the often-policed boundary between art and the everyday life.
Our Common Threads will be an embodiment of relationality. The final tapestry will not be merely a collection of separate thoughts, knowledge, and stories. They will be woven together through interdependence, shared meanings, and stories that illuminate relationships with others. The tapestry cannot be crocheted without each piece relying on another. The conference themes will show how each subtheme, from aging to ecological conservation to community and Indigenous partnerships, share connections and relations from different disciplines and ways of knowing that foster wellbeing. Threads of interconnected knowledge strengthen relations between each other, strengthening the wellness of each connection. The genesis of the net tapestry in place-based knowledge and material culture reinforces the importance of arts and culture for rural identity, while the tragic story of the orca echoes the imperative of environmental stewardship as a foundation of holistic well-being. It will tell a greater narrative of the fishing net than anyone could have imagined.
Crochet serves as a process and metaphor for relationality. Each stitch and technique depends on the previous stitches. The integrity of the tapestry is kept together by a thread that is linked and looped around; it cannot last unless there is trust and reliance on the previous rows. In Our Common Threads, crochet will be a connective practice where participants’ creations and meanings are interdependent on one another. Each stitch expresses an individualistic interpretation yet needs to be understood within the context that all the pieces create. By engaging with crochet and the installation, participants can experience how caring hands and gentle labour contrast the industrial recycling of fishing nets.
The proposed art installation is a continuation of the community-engaged art project developed in Conche, NL, From Tragedy to Tapestry, a collaboration with the French Shore Interpretation Centre, repurposing an old fishing net into a crocheted tapestry. The net was retrieved by Shawn Bath, a diver and founder of Clean Harbours Initiative, while doing harbour clean-ups on the east coast of Newfoundland. Bath was in Twillingate when he encountered the carcass of a juvenile male orca that had drowned from getting its tail strangled by a free-floating fishing net in the ocean. The tragic death of this whale is part of a larger problem of ghost gear – abandoned, lost, or broken fishing gear that continues to “fish” and choke out marine life. Watch Hell or Clean Water on CBC Gem which features Bath removing the net from the orca.
The inspiration to create a tapestry comes from the French Shore Tapestry displayed in the French Shore Interpretation Centre in Conche, which is a 227-foot-long tapestry hand embroidered by a group of local women depicting the region’s history from the 1500s up to its completion in 2010. In spring 2025 in collaboration with the interpretation centre, community members took the initiative to repurpose a piece of the fishing net into a crocheted tapestry featuring symbols of local people’s life and work. May 2025 involved a month of engaged events and activities in the form of workshops, social gatherings, and open maker sessions. Multiple generations contributed to the net’s transformation in many ways. Community members crocheted their own 8 x 8cm squares as well as donated wool and old works-in-progress to help support the materials needed. Visitors to the centre helped sew together some pieces, retired fishers provided knowledge about the net which imparted a greater meaning to the work, youth experienced an afternoon of playful art adding voices of the future, and some donated pieces in memory of loved ones.
The purpose of this community-engaged art transformation was to not only recycle the net and remove it from the ecosystem permanently, but also to demonstrate how arts, culture, and heritage have the power to bring people together and motivate sustainability actions, no matter how small. Each act of kindness and support helped weave together the handmade squares that were core to the net’s transformation. It also shows how different perspectives, knowledge, and interpretations can change the trajectory of the process and create new meaning beyond what can be individually thought of. In Conche, the community guided the transformation process through personal and collective values and unique skills shaped by their strong fishing culture and the significance of handcrafts for survival throughout the centuries. This strong culture of textiles imparts a materiality to the piece born directly from the place-based experiences of the community. Through this embedded process, the community co-created and re-created the net into a present-day cultural artifact that has evolved in real time.
The net tapestry is the result of looking to alternative knowledge and perspectives to addressing a sustainability problem – keeping the net out of the marine and terrestrial ecosystems. This environmental stewardship goal is one interpretation of transformative action and meaning-making that comes from the individual and collective voices of Conche. There is a larger narrative to uncover, and an unknown number of interpretations, transformation pathways, and untold knowledge knotted in the wiry, crimpled, remains of this once great and useful man-made object. The more people that interacted with its transformation, the more we can know and relate to one another in the greater web of life. The final net tapestry is a beautiful mosaic of individual and collective creativity that carries the stories and skills behind each square, telling a greater story full of richer knowledge beyond anyone’s individual way of thinking and perceiving. The journey that began with the imperative to act against the ghost gear problem evolved through the patchwork of community perspectives and embodied experiences into a story of community identity, skills, and materiality.
From Tragedy to Tapestry has a legacy that is yet to be fully discovered. The project was not written to end. Even though the net tapestry’s home will always be Conche, the ideas and actions taken can inspire others to take up the challenge of creative sustainability transformation. It is the beginning of a greater transformation and knowledge generation around relational being with the human and nonhuman world. From Tragedy to Tapestry is one (collective) interpretation and it invites others to take part in the same knowledge-sharing and co-creating activities as the net continues spreading across communities. Building on this experience, Our Common Threads will be a tangible and intangible process of knowledge mobilization with the community-engaged tapestry and while moving forward in discovering new ways of collective transformation, it ventures beyond the community into the spheres of academic research and rural dialogue.
Our Common Threads will be present for the annual Iceberg Festival that brings together the coastal communities of St. Anthony, L’Anse aux Meadows, Conche, Roddickton-Bide Arn, and St. Luniare-Griquet. The Iceberg Festival is a 10-day celebration of “the natural coastline of the Great Northern Peninsula and local craftspeople, storytellers, chefs, and musicians – among breathtaking landscapes and seascapes.” Communities hold their own unique events, creating a nexus for community members and tourists to explore, experience, learn, and interact with each other and the coastal identity of the GNP. Our Common Threads will be a series of craft workshops, social gatherings, and intergenerational activities hosted in the neighbouring communities of Roddickton, Englee, Bird Cove, and Main Brook to engage the broader French Shore region in collecting new stories, historical confirmation, finding familial ties between communities, and strengthening social and cultural inter-community connections.
Our Common Threads will take a new piece of the fishing net and repurpose it into another crochet work of art. This will be a traveling interactive arts installation that goes to these communities in the French Shore where stories, experiences, perspectives, and knowledge will be translated through crochet and embedded into the threads that connect the empty spaces between the fish net wire. It will become a living tapestry of regional knowledge, culture, history, and identity.
From Tragedy to Tapestry is the result of community members in Conche approaching sustainable transformation from an artistic and cultural perspective. Our Common Threads continues the fishing net transformation but rather than exploring how people interpret sustainability, it explores what makes sustainability in the French Shore. Additionally, where From Tragedy to Tapestry focused on environmental conservation, this will focus on the broader components of sustainability and wellbeing.
Check back for more information on the Iceberg Festival and a schedule for Our Common Threads.
The beginnings of the new tapestry will be brought to the NAF/CRRF conference and Shore2Shore. Conference attendees will be invited to engage with the multi-sensory installation and participate in a two-way knowledge experience where people learn about what sustainability and wellness means in the French Shore.
Participants can reflect on the tragic and transformative narrative of the net, share their stories, knowledge, background, and experience on different aspects of sustainability, or add to place-based knowledge. By bringing Our Common Threads on the road to Grenfell, place-based knowledge and values co-mingle with external community knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, and natural and social sciences to co-create a deeper meaning of sustainability and wellness that can be brought back to the French Shore. Our Common Threads will help visualize relational knowledge that is needed for understanding the whole and with threads of meaning connecting different ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing for a relational map of collective sustainability knowledge.
Norris Point and Flat Bay will each have a piece of net where community members can lead their own sustainability transformation.
The net has already brought together community members, creating a circle of shared values and mission to be part of the change. Become a part of our community. Be part of the transformation.
Check back for more information.
Check back for more information.